Getting Started with Vista Social: Scheduling

Hey everyone, it’s Vie here from the customer success team, and today we’re diving into scheduling and publishing.

Understanding the Create Section Options

Let’s look at our dashboard here and on the left-side menu, let’s focus on the create section, where we have six main options. First up, we have new post. This option lets you create a single post across multiple social networks, which will be our main agenda later. We’ve got bulk publishing here for scheduling multiple pieces of content at once. And Vista Social can also help you find content using Instagram hashtags, users, or news. You can also use the smart publisher to automatically add content to your calendar based on news or your own RSS feed. Whilst our IG and TikTok planner here can help you plan content as if you were doing it on your mobile apps on feed. And if you’re keen on posting good reads on X (formerly Twitter), you can also use our thread maker right here as well. Now, we have a bunch of help center articles in our support center that will dive deeper in all of these options.

Creating Your New Post

Now let’s jump right into creating our new post. Before we open up the publisher, we highly suggest that you choose the profile groups or the social profiles that you want to post to first so that you can make sure that you’re publishing your posts to the right brand, business, or client account. Now, another good tip is to start from left to right. I’m using my coffee shop here as an example, and we’ve got Facebook and TikTok, which means that this post is going to get scheduled in these three networks.

Crafting Content and Adding Media

Now, in the middle here is probably the part where you’re going to spend most of your time when crafting your post. So let’s go ahead and just write out a piece of content. And we can even add emojis or hashtags. And if you’re running out of hashtags to use or to think of, you can use our hashtag suggestions feature here and you can save it for later as well. If you want to mention others in your post, our Universal Mentions feature can definitely help you tag the correct user or page. And if this caption that we’ve just created is something that we will most likely use frequently, we can also save it for next time right here on the saved captions widget.

Now, maybe you want to style your text to make it bold, or maybe let’s add a fancy font style for the word coffee, right here. As for attaching media, we’ve got images, videos, and even documents that we support here on Vista Social. You can either upload from your computer, choose from your Vista Social media library, or maybe it’s on your Google Drive or other online cloud storages that we’re integrated with. You can also use our Discover feature to find video from royalty-free media sites, Instagram hashtags, or Instagram users. Now, if you’re a fan of using Canva to create your graphics, it’s a great thing that we’re integrated with them too.

Customizing Video Content

Now, let’s add our media. Today I’m feeling reels, so let’s add a video from my media library here. And once our media is in, Vista Social gives me options with the action button. I can customize my thumbnail either from choosing from the video frames here at the bottom, or even upload my own design. Just make sure that the thumbnail matches the correct aspect ratio and dimensions of the video.

Now, for the sound, Vista Social has a built-in library of trending sounds, or you can also upload your own sound, like what I’ve just created here. Now, I can override the video sound with the one I’ve chosen. And closing out of that, we’ve got our video post.

Platform-Specific Customization

On the right side here is where a lot of customization happens. Now, I’ve got my Instagram pulled up here and I can add a comment. Maybe I want the hashtag to be at the first comment, which I can also do in Vista Social. There are advanced settings for stories or feed posts and there’s also a location tagging. You can pretty much customize each network as you like. You can switch up your captions. Maybe I want more hashtags for Instagram and none for Facebook. And if I change my mind later and I want an image for Facebook instead, I can also do that and it will not change the video that we have just attached to IG and TikTok.

Scheduling Your Post

Once we’re happy with the post, we can now schedule it using the scheduling options at the bottom. You can use publish now for time-sensitive posts. And if you’re into queue-based scheduling, you can also add posts to queues for different profiles. And of course, there’s also the draft option.

Finally, we have the scheduling option here. You can pick a specific date and time as to when your post goes out. Our Optimal Time feature is also very helpful in ensuring that your content reaches your audience at the right moment to maximize your post engagements. Now, if someone from your team wants to review the post before it goes out, you can also send it for approval to a specific user or an approval workflow, which you can set up in settings.

Viewing Your Scheduled Posts

Alright, so I’ll hit schedule, and let me show you where the post ends up in the calendar. So, we scheduled it for Valentine’s Day, February 14th, in there. Now, depending on the status of your post, you will see it color-coded. For example, purple means here that it’s currently in review, while blue means that it’s already scheduled and set to go out on its published date and time.

For all things Vista Social, check out our getting started playlist and you’ll have your account up and running in no time. Happy scheduling.